Haroun and the Sea of Stories #3
- Abby
- Oct 31, 2016
- 4 min read
I hate to say it, but this is the third and FINAL HATSOS post. Don't be sad, though. Aren't some of the best stories trilogies?
Story Thoughts:
Okay, so I think it was at some point during my first post that I explained I would be disappointed if Haroun didn't grow as a character and learn the importance of stories. Now that I have finished the book, I know that he does grow. Yet, I am still disappointed with the ending but for an entirely different reason.
{SPOILERS}
In the end, Haroun's mother comes back. It was predictable and boring and way too neat. During our discussion, a few of us talked about how the story ended with a perfectly tied bow and we really didn't appreciate that. Rashid and Haroun just welcomed her back with open arms, seeming not at all bothered that she had once believed them to be not enough for her and abandoned them.
I don't want to dwell on that though because it really isn't the most important part of this post.
Lenses:
It's time for everyone's favorite recurring segment: Lenses!
Lenses have been key to the way that I've been reading HATSOS. While I mainly focused on the satirical lens, I found the others to be interesting as well. "Allegory" made me wonder about Rushdie and his life. "Hero's Journey" showed me how vastly different stories all have the same roots. The final lens that wasn't my own is "Allusion" and is actually one of my favorites.
Allusions are, in my opinion, one of the most clever parts of the book. Since HATSOS is so deeply intertwined with the notion of storytelling, I think that adding references to other stories just makes the most sense. To reference a quote from a past post: "Since this is a story about stories, not having stories kills the story."
Annotations:
Welcome to the part of the post where I remember how bad I was at actually annotating this book.
Lucky for you, I do have a favorite one from that last section of the book that I read. It is, "And inside every
single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all," (Rushdie 161).
The quote is a piece of dialogue from Khattam-Shud, leader of the Chups. In the margin by that quote, I wrote, "Satire? We dislike losing control." I think that Khattam-Shud was satire because of his overwhelming need to have control. He disliked storied because he couldn't control what they said or how they impacted people. Most of us don't try to kill oceans of stories and silence whole kingdoms, but we all have our ways of trying to keep a hold on to our surroundings. When things go wrong, we start to feel like we're spiraling. I think Rushdie was trying to make a point about how not everything is able to be changed. Our control over life is limited.
Literary Analysis:
Just a heads-up: If I'm being perfectly honest, I do not know how to do this section of the post, but I will try it out and see how it goes.
I think this story is trying to teach us just how important stories are in our lives. Throughout HATSOS, stories were crucial to moving the plot forward. For example, when Haroun drank the story water, he discovered a completely twisted and wrong version of a Princess Rescue story and realized the Ocean was polluted. I think that through using stories in a fantasy way, it reflects on to the real world. The everyday person doesn't use stories to save a moon, but we use them to move us forward. We learn from stories and they make us grow. Stories are woven into our lives in a way so that we would fall apart without them. This what makes "The Storytelling Animal" resonate with us.
"Fictional stories are morally good lies" and Discussion:
The statement above was what started my class's unit on HATSOS. We talked about what it meant to be "morally good". Who decides what is "good"? Are stories lies?
Through our discussion, we collectively decided that stories aren't even lies in the first place because they aren't meant to be perceived as true. One other point we touched upon was the connotative differences between lies and stories. Lies are wrong; the make us feel hurt, angry, betrayed. Stories, on the other hand, conjure up feelings of creativity and imagination.
I feel that this idea is addressed quite clearly at the end of the book. Haroun wishes for his city to be happy again. He has good intentions and it helps out the people around him. Haroun, however, knows how fake this happiness is. It was cast upon the city unnaturally. In a way, it is a lie. This fictional happiness was a morally good lie.
All good things come to an end...
I think it is just about time for me to close up my Haroun and the Sea of Stories series. In a way, it's a little sad because I feel like I did a really good job on saying what I needed to say and that felt good. It made things a bit more orderly up in my brain.
And I liked this story a lot. Even if the end was a little disappointing, I'm glad I read it. Maybe I'll even read it again one day when there are no strings attached.
Without further ado, I say on the last installment of my HATSOS series:
Au revoir,
Abby
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